“God no.” She went.
The stewardess came down the aisle looking at laps to make certain of the fastenings of seat belts; a man’s twangy voice scratched from the loudspeakers, something about cruising altitude and the landmarks over which they were destined to pass—landmarks that doubtless would be invisible through the clouds below. A junior stewardess who looked no more than sixteen was demonstrating the use of a yellow oxygen mask and the lap-belt inspector was asking if Carole wanted a drink after take-off—Carole had to ask her to repeat the question.
She hated planes: the stale air redolent of tobacco smoke and kerosene, the immobile imprisonment at six hundred miles an hour, the way even first-class seats had been designed with not quite enough leg room.
With her eyes shut and her head vibrating against the white paper antimacassar she sipped Dewar’s and drifted in thought. The mad hurry of the morning recycled itself through her mind—Mort Kyle walking her to her car at noon: “Don’t feel you have to rush back for God’s sake. If you’re still in Washington I’ll ship the final cut there and you can screen it at the AFI.”
At the car she had stopped to fish for her keys, only half listening to him; she’d said abruptly, “How do you make contact with gangsters?”
He was taken aback. She said, “I’m serious.”
It made him show his teeth. “You walk into any studio in town and ask to see the head man.”
“You’ve dealt with the Mafia, I know you have. Nobody can produce pictures in this industry without knowing them.”
“What are you after?”
“I don’t know. Desperation, I suppose. I want to hire a tarnished knight to go into the jungle and rescue my son. Does it sound imbecilic?”
“To tell the truth yes, it does, if only because you don’t even know what jungle to look in.”
“There was that private eye who rescued Marlon’s son.…”
“I know what he’d tell you. He’d tell you to forget it.”
“I’ve got to do something.”
“There’s nothing. You’re doing all you can. As for gangsters, I know some of the union people. They’d hardly do you any good.”
It had been a far-fetched impulse—a fantasy of panic. Now she remembered it with rue.
Warren would have known what to do. She thought of him infrequently now—he’d died more than two years ago trying to rescue a charred Rhodesian family from a napalmed hut. Her brother had been as quixotic as her son was; she thought it must be something in the genes. She wondered if she had it too.
He’d had a great importance in her life. She’d relied on her brother although it was quite possible he’d never known of it. It was a thing of the spirit—merely knowing Warren was alive, knowing he was her brother, knowing he’d come if she needed him: There’d been equilibrium in that.
Warren the intellectual adventurer: Right now he’d have been hiring a helicopter or galvanizing forces or interviewing jungle natives to find the terrorists’ hideout. He’d have known where to look, whom to recruit, how to handle it. Warren Marchand—brilliant journalist, compassionate missionary of the spirit, troubled activist. For months she’d grieved his passing. She’d kept a scrapbook of his dispatches from Beirut and Saigon and Johannesburg and Salisbury and Belfast—Warren the eclectic adventurer. Her inscribed copy of his first book was nearly worn off its bindings: Published in 1965 and nearly everything he’d predicted for Viet Nam had come to pass.
He’d free-lanced for the high-paying magazines; not a reporter really—it was his observations for which they’d paid him. You read a Marchand article not for facts but for truths: He showed you the flavor and the significance of things.
Every six months or so he’d appear on her doorstep—the quick Marchand grip and she’d drop anything, cancel any date, to go out to dinner with him and catch up on the latest chapter of his picaresque life. He’d been Robert’s favorite, of course; possibly it was Warren’s example that had inspired Robert to join the Peace Corps.
The genes, she thought. The same good genes in Robert had overcome the rotten upbringing. The custody fight had ended in uneasy truce after the ludicrous kidnapings and spiritings about: A split-custody agreement by which Robert spent much of the year in boarding school and divided his vacations scrupulously between them.
Robert. Not Bob, never Bobby, but Robert. Robert Lundquist. Robert Warren Lundquist. She was still counting on him. He’d have to get out of it, she needed him too much for him to let her down.
Thursday she haunted the telephones and spent half the afternoon sitting stonily before Howard’s desk browbeating him with silent baleful looks. She badgered him into making constant phone calls: State Intelligence, the CIA, even someone at the White House.
There was nothing. No one knew whether the Latin American governments planned to accede or hang tough. No one knew who the guerrillas were or where the hostages were held. There was no further ransom demand; no word at all from the terrorists.
“The deadline,” she kept saying, “is noon tomorrow,” and watched it annoy him.
Midafternoon—the Latin American desks began to send copies of reports into Howard’s office. There were rivalries among Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia; things were bogged down in maddeningly trivial disputes; it looked as if the three governments might fail to reach agreement on a policy of dealing with the demands. Mexico and Colombia favored paying the ransom; Venezuela, taking a hard line, looked as if it would refuse to negotiate, let alone pay.
She screamed at him and he bolted upright from his chair, shouting at her: “Do you think I’m any less frustrated than you are? Do you think I like feeling impotent to do anything about it?”
She waited for him to breathe; she said with dead calm, “I want to see somebody in the CIA. Somebody high up. You can arrange it.”
“If you think those guys will tell you a damn thing you’re out of your mind.”
“You make the appointment. I’ll do the interviewing.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Now, Howard. Do it now.” She was unrelenting.
He sat severely behind a desk beneath the official photographic portrait of the President. The desk looked to be mahogany. The man wore a checked bow tie on a starched white shirt and wore his salt-and-pepper hair in sleek fingerwaves; his glasses had rectangular lenses and thin white-gold frames and he had the look of an aging matinee idol with a second-string touring road-company. His name was O’Hillary.
She knew how she must appear to him—a slender woman, very tense with eyes hungry for information; and rather a bit helpless. She was not above lying, not above playing a role; she was not above anything.
She said, “I had an appointment with a Mr. Ryerson but they told me he’d been taken suddenly busy and couldn’t see me.”
“I know. A harmless lie. Sit down, Mrs. Lundquist. Actually, George Ryerson farmed you out to me because I’m dealing with this Mexican mess. By coming here you’ve avoided the middleman, so it’s not really a runaround we’ve given you.”
She said, “What’s being done about my son?”
The man ran a palm over his head carefully, not dislodging the neat wave in his hair. “I’m sure your ex-husband’s told you everything he could.”
“Howard’s part of this bureaucracy of yours and possibly that explains why he has faith that everything possible is being done. I’m sorry to be blunt but I want to know what’s going on.”
“We’re doing all we can. Surely you must believe that.”
“Specifically what does that consist of?”
“At the moment it consists of a massive attempt on numerous different fronts to acquire information. We can’t make any moves while we’re blind. You can understand that.”
“Do you know where they are? The hostages?”
“No. No idea.”
“Do you know who the terrorists are?”
“We have suspicions but not facts. We believe they may be a splinter group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles—left over, so to speak, from the Bay of Pigs days. Determined to foment the overthrow of the Castro government. We’ve sent investigators—most of them from the Federal Bureau of Investigation—into south Florida to find out what they can from the members of the Cuban community there. At this point in time they’ve been able to shed no light on this. I can’t really tell you any more than that.”